Nadine Gordimer advocates book over screen
Charlotte Higgins
Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, one of South Africa’s most
distinguished literary figures and a veteran of the anti-apartheid
struggle, has mounted a passionate defence of the printed book against
the onslaught of technology. The Nobel laureate defends printed word and
calls for libraries in shanty towns in Hamlin lecture at Guardian Hay
festival.
Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer speaking at the Hay festival.
Picture by David Levenson |
In the week that the iPad was launched in the UK, Gordimer said:
“There is no substitute for the book, and it would be a great
deprivation and danger if the book should disappear and be replaced by
something with a battery.”
She said of mobile phone and computer technology: “I am not talking
in a fuddy-duddy way about this. These things are wonderful for
disseminating information.
“But for poetry, for novels, stories – those things that have the
imagination at their heart – there is no substitute for the book.”
Gordimer was delivering the Hamlin lecture at the Guardian Hay
festival.
In a wide-ranging prospectus for the future of literary culture in
the 21st century, she addressed the problem of how literature might be
distributed to a remote and rural population in Africa and elsewhere.
Rather than harnessing the power of mobile phone technology, she
believes the answer lies in books and in public libraries and provision
of texts in schools. “We need libraries in rural communities and shanty
towns,” she said.
“This is a very big question: whether technology will outstrip the
printed word. But with a gadget you are always dependent on a battery
and on power of some sort. A book won’t fall apart; you can read it as
easily on a mountaintop as in a bus queue. The printed word is
irreplaceable, and much threatened.”
On an electronic screen, she said, “the words pass as an image before
you. If you want to turn back, it is something you have to manage. With
a book, you are flipping back and your eye may be caught indeed by other
passages.
“Reading the image is different from reading the text in a book.”
She said that in Africa there are “thousands who don’t have access to
the online world. And there are virtually no bookstores in the vast
areas where the blacks used to be confined under apartheid.”
Gordimer, who is 86, also recounted at the weekend her early
adventures in poetry. Aged nine, she had written a verse in praise of
Boer hero Paul Kruger that began: “Noble in heart, noble in mind/ Never
deceitful, never unkind.” Despite the precision of language in her
novels (notable among which is The Conservationist, which won the Booker
prize in 1974), she said: “I wasn’t up to poetry.”
Asked to name her most significant authors, she emphasised Proust,
whom she had read in English as a girl, later in French, and recently
for a third time. “I realised in anguish there were some books I’d
better reread before I die, so I decided to read it again in French,”
she said.
When she was a girl, she said, “it showed me what a complex human
thing was love; how it is a basic human relation that has nothing to do
with the fact that one had to get married and have children. It also
gave me an idea of freedom, and the trouble one might get into because
of it.”
- The Guardian |